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No, that's *36* bits young man.No, that's *36* bits young man.Posted Sep 12, 2002 8:07 UTC (Thu) by oldtoss (guest, #3648)In reply to: 16bit versus 32bit? by smoogen Parent article: Multics security, thirty years later Not that bitness should have a great deal of influence on code size, but FYI Multics used 36 bit hardware (4 9-bit bytes). It isn't clear whether the authors allowed for the difference in byte width, so let's make that 706.5K to err on the safe side. Multics still comes out vastly less bloated. Remember also the Multics hardcore needed much *more* memory management code (relative to i386) to work with a much more primitive MMU. So, now you all know the facts, please don't perpetuate the old FUD about bloat.
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No, that's *36* bits young man. Posted Sep 12, 2002 9:37 UTC (Thu) by beejaybee (guest, #1581) [Link] Yeah, well, when I started programming seriously (about 1975) I was told in no uncertain terms that if it wouldn't run in 16K (24-bit words - NOT on multics h/w), it wasn't worth writing.Things have moved on a bit since then, but "small is beautiful" is obviously still a worthwhile concept. Plain straightforward common sense suggests than the bigger a chunk of code is, the more likely it is to contain bugs - and security holes.
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